It’s a weird bird, Twitter.
Some of you may be very active users of Twitter and some of you may never have tried it and some may even consider it silly. That’s okay. We are not going to force you to use Twitter, though we think the community activities built into the Agora may change your perspective.
The primary reason we are asking you to create a Twitter account has nothing to do with twitter. A part of the Agora you will learn about in the Prepping Your Tools Foundation Studio, the Challenge Bank, will ask you to use your twitter name to identify everything you contribute to the site. We are using it to track your work so we do not have to make you log into the site.
Twitter is also the way you participate in our small challenges of The Daily Try. To have your reply to a Daily Try show up on the site, you must include two things in your tweet:
- Send it to the AgoraUdG twitter account
@AgoraUdG(note this is different from our #AgoraUdG hashtag) - Also include the hashtag for that day’s activity, it will be something like
#agoratry33
Again, we are not gauging your activity at all by how much you tweet. If you find it gives you some value and ability to connect with colleagues, you may take it up more.
We do think you will find in our activities it is an effective way to share ideas and give feedback in a place like the Agora. So here is your first key twitter lesson:
This is a convention that allows everyone to “see” or “hear” what others have said, via the #UdGAgora hashtag view. This makes twitter conversational when we reply and share with each other. And we use a tool to visualize these conversations; this is very early in the process
If you visit the live link for this visualization, it can be examined in different dimensions, and as shown above, you can see the conversational history of a participant.
Learn More About Twitter
Do not worry if twitter seems odd; wait until you experience it during our week together in the Agora. But as a great guide for educators, we recommend The Twitteraholic’s Ultimate Guide to tweets, hashtags, and all things Twitter (Sue Waters).
While geared for business persons this tutorial from the University of Florida (en Español) offers a goo introduction to features of Twitter:
